foster my passion for nature, the smallest manifestations of which he
deified. He delighted in proving to me that it was useless for man
to seek beyond nature for unattainable chimeras, for the infinite
which our finite conception was unable to understand, and for the
immaterial, which our materiality can never satisfactorily explain.
He laid particular stress on this point; he unveiled to me all the
great and small laws of life and movement, both those which rule the
motion of the universe so splendidly, and those which govern the world
of ants, whose ways and manners he had already taught me. But the
great demonstrations furnished by ants, however much they impressed
my mind, always made me laugh, for this reason: An old neighbour of
ours, Madame Viet, seemed to have but one occupation in life, that of
destroying ants, and but one subject of conversation, the “frumions”
(as she called them, in _patois_) which she had scalded during the
day, and whose dead bodies she kept, whenever she could, to count
them at night, either in imagination or in reality. As soon as she
would appear outside her door, after a very curt “good-morning” to her
neighbours, she would start a long conversation about the ants. In all
the neighbourhood and at home we all joked about Madame Viet and the
quantity of ants she destroyed.
Her granddaughter, whose father was a large farmer in the adjacent
country, was one of my schoolmates at Chauny; she spent a few days of
each week during the holidays with her grandmother, and was the first
to laugh about the ants. Whenever I went to see Saint-Just’s sister,
Madame Decaisne and the Chevalier, I was always asked for news of our
friend and her “frumions.” The more she killed the more they reappeared
in greater numbers; it really seemed as if they were brought by some
one during the night into her courtyard.
We had some beehives, and I delighted in watching their daily,
never-varying work, about which my old Homer had sung thousands of
years before. My father, desiring to convince me that men and animals
are what we make them by kindness and education, taught me, little by
little, how to tame my bees. I used to take them sugar and flowers, and
they never stung me.
“It is because you love them,” said my father, “and they know it well.”
I was as fond of my Blérancourt bees as of my Chauny pigeons, and came
to know their ways, their work, their tastes, and their organisation. I
used to talk to them, and they understood me as well as did my pigeons.
“You see,” said my father, “nature amply suffices for the need of
observation, of sociability and love which exists in man. He is,
himself, the conscious reflection of the whole life of the universe.
If you wish to worship something, worship the sun, the God that gives
you life, that surrounds you with heat, that illuminates all things,
and, under whose rays, everything grows, everything comes to life and
palpitates.”
Under the powerful and incessant pressure of my father’s mind, I
gradually came to see everything from his point of view. Anyone
mentioning the words “apostleship” or “holiness,” would at once have
made me think of my father, whose charity and kindness were without
bounds.
I was unwilling to return to Chauny and to the school, now occupying
the place of my beloved lost garden. I begged my father to delay my
departure from Blérancourt, under pretext of my studying with him.
He had begun with me a course of Greek history which he desired to
finish. He was perfecting me as a “poetess,” and the verses I sent to
grandmother, who was very fond of poetry, were considered much superior
to my first attempts, both by Blondeau and my friend Charles. In this
way I reached Christmas, and the impress of both republicanism and
paganism became more and more developed in my mind. My father’s ideas
fell into ground already prepared for them by heredity. And then, who
could have resisted so much warmth of heart, such a passionate love of
the beautiful and the good?
Winter set in very severely at the end of October, and we met so many
poorly clad people on the roads that my father and I felt ashamed of
our warm clothing, and it often happened that we returned home without
wraps or shoes. My mother, who was also charitable, but in a sensible
way, gave away only warm clothing; and she would abuse my father and
scold me for being as foolish as he was.
Liénard had given back to me my large travelling-purse, and begged to
be allowed to offer me the little things we had bought together at
Boulogne-sur-Mer. This money was of the greatest use to us for our
poor, but it was soon exhausted.
My father would have spent millions had he possessed them. He could not
be trusted with money, for he gave it instantly away.
My mother, who had carefully saved up the money for the tilbury, sent
it to Liénard, knowing well that if she confided it to my father he
would without fail give it to the poor, and not replace his worn-out
carriage. He was, however, most desirous of having a new one, the old
carriage being much too heavy when the wheels were covered with mud,
which was the case eight months out of the year, on the badly kept
roads around Blérancourt at that time.
My mother never allowed my father any loose money; but if his patients’
bills were small at Decaisne’s, the chemist, a nephew of Saint-Just,
when the end of each month came, there were painful surprises for my
mother’s slender purse, when the butcher, the baker, and grocer had to
be paid. Added to this, my father often found that people were too poor
to pay for his visits. If he did not grow rich, he at least grew in
influence, and his republican proselytes numbered hundreds. Blérancourt
was now becoming a centre of violent agitation. The most revolutionary
pamphlets were read there; a large fair was held in the town every
month, and my father’s ideas reached all the surrounding villages;
the propaganda became more and more active. Nothing was talked of
but reforms, progress, the lowering of the census, the accession to
political life, not only of the educated class, but also of the lower
classes.
In my letters to grandmother I told her, of course, as cleverly as I
could, of my new opinions, but only of those of republican tendency and
touching upon nature. Without discussing them, she answered that she
was anxious about me, that, becoming republican first, I would surely
become a socialist, and, from being a worshipper of nature, turn pagan
and atheist, like my father; that it was the logical outcome of such an
education, and that there was no escaping it. She added that my father
was disloyal to her in destroying in my mind what she had implanted
there.
XXX
A SERIOUS ACCIDENT
During the first days of December an excited correspondence about
me began between my father and my grandmother, which increased in
violence. She declared she would not consent to my staying away until
Christmas; that she had been deprived of my presence too long; that I
was her sole reason for living, and that she insisted on my returning
to her at the end of the week we had just begun.
“If you do not send her back to me,” wrote grandmother, “I shall alter
my will; you will have nothing, and Juliette can wait for the _dot_ you
will save up for her.”
This was my father’s answer:
“I am preparing her to marry a workman!”
When my father told me his answer, I said to him:
“That is a joke, is it not?”
“No,” he answered, “it is my dearest wish.”
“It is not mine!” I answered curtly. “I would give up my life for our
cause, but I have no taste for the slow torture of married life out of
my own sphere.”
“Juliette!”
“It is true, papa, and I will never, never marry a man who is my
inferior.”
“Well, where is your theory of equality?”
“Equality of rights--yes, papa, I believe in that with all my heart,
but equality in manners and ways of life--no, never!”
My father was angry and I was sulky.
During the day a cartload of wood was brought to the door, and, fearing
a fall of snow, my father, my mother, and myself helped to carry in the
logs. As I stooped to pick some up in my arms, my father, taking up one
of the logs, gave me such a blow that I screamed with pain. I stood up
and found the blood flowing from my temple and left eye. My father,
under the impression that he had destroyed my eye, had one of his fits
of madness. His only fault was his extreme violence of temper. In one
of his rages he had killed a dog of whom he was very fond. In another,
because his brother-in-law, a man as tall and as strong as himself, had
somewhat roughly treated his wife, my father’s sister, he would have
killed him also, if they had not been separated.
He brandished his log of wood furiously, and cried out:
“I would rather see my daughter dead than living with only one eye! I
shall kill her and myself afterwards!”
My mother tried in vain to hold him back. The gardener endeavoured to
wrest the log from him. I suffered intensely. I was half blinded, and
I, too, thought my eye was gone. I was not afraid of death; I was only
afraid that my father would commit the crime of killing himself and me.
It was a horrible moment. I was paralysed, but, seeing that my father
was on the point of escaping from my mother and the gardener, I
rushed into the house, and with all my might held the door shut which
separated my father from the crime he was about to commit.
My mother kept crying out to him that he would end on the scaffold and
dishonour his family. Blattier, the gardener, besought him, saying:
“Monsieur Lambert, as good as you are, you are surely not going to do
such a dreadful thing!”
I mastered myself, and said to my father in calm tones, through the
door:
“Very well, papa, you mean to kill me, but let me first go upstairs for
a minute to wash my eye and see whether it is really gone.”
I let go the door--it did not open. My father, who was struggling
against their terrified supplications, was dumfounded at the sound
of my calm voice. He let fall his log of wood, and leaned against the
wall, and, from my little room, where I was bathing my eye, I could
hear his sobs and cries of grief.
My heart stood still when I turned up my eyelid. My eyebrow was cut
open, but I could see. I folded a wet handkerchief over the wound with
one hand, and ran to my father. I looked angrily at him. I was furious
with him for not knowing how to master his violent temper, and I felt
that but for my calmness, the presence of mind of a mere child, he
would have killed me.
“You see,” I said, coldly, “my eye is not put out. It would have
been useless to kill me. Only my eyebrow is cut, and I am going to
Decaisne’s to have it dressed.”
“Juliette!” cried both of my parents. I did not heed them, but ran
to Decaisne. I told him I had hurt myself and that my father was so
nervous about it he was unable to treat the wound.
Grandmother arrived next day to take me away. I had not spoken a single
word to my father, or answered any of his questions, for I thought that
he deserved severe blame.
Grandmother never guessed anything of the truth about this lamentable
event, but she thought me feverish. I told her quite naturally before
my father, how I had hurt myself, and she never gave a second thought
to such a simple fact as the sudden shutting of a door on me, which was
the version I gave her. My father winced under my protecting lies. I
think he would have much preferred a scene of violent reproach to my
calm indulgence.
I kissed him coldly as I left. Tears ran down his face, which induced
grandmother to give him a passionate embrace.
“Come, my son,” she said, “we will divide her, and each take half, for
she belongs solely to us.”
My mother at these words grew angry with me.
“You are clever enough to make yourself beloved,” she said in my ear,
kissing me coldly, “but I do not see what you gain by the exaggerated
love you inspire. Remember the log of wood!”
Grandmother got into the carriage. My father heard my mother’s last
words, and was about to give way once more to his violent temper, but
calmed himself, and said to me, kissing me with all his heart:
“Juliette, my darling child, forgive me!”
XXXI
“LIBERTY, EQUALITY, AND FRATERNITY”
When I stayed with my father I missed my grandmother--her liveliness,
her fancies, her caprices, her gracious tenderness, and her maternal
feeling. Grandfather’s wit amused and rested me, and to be without
Blondeau’s devotion and my friend Charles’s admiration was a great
deprivation. But as soon as I returned to grandmother I felt myself an
orphan. I was nervous, my mind was empty, I was stupefied, and became
more childlike, more enervated, less fit for “the struggle for life,”
a phrase which grandfather indulged in too frequently and used on all
occasions.
These allusions to the “struggle for life” sometimes came up in such a
droll manner in conversation that they made us all laugh, but I often
thought that these same struggles did really exist, and were anything
but droll. Had I not already experienced them? The memory of that scene
of my father’s violence rose so tragically in my mind that it seemed to
impress me much more when I invoked it than at the time when I endured
the pain. Then, too, my father’s strange, insane idea of marrying me
to a workman never left my mind.
I had sometimes dreamed of a cottage or a farm, with a gentleman
for a husband, but never of a “lodging,” with a weaver’s loom or a
carpenter’s block in the centre of the room, waiting for “my man” to
return from taking his work home, having “finished his day.”
I could have no doubts about my deep and growing love for the people--a
love which in my days of enthusiasm seemed capable of enabling me to
sacrifice my very life for their cause; I wished to help them and
to serve them, but to form a part of them,--I, whom generations of
ancestors had elevated above them--that I could never do.
I recalled Saint-Just’s words, which his sister often repeated to me in
speaking of the elegance of the young Jacobite, “the people’s friend.”
He said:
“I wish to raise the people up to me, and desire to see them one day
dressed as I am myself, but I will never lower myself to them nor wear
their blue blouse.”
My father, on the contrary, delighted to wear the _sayon_ of the Gauls,
the peasant’s blouse, and workman’s smock-frock. He failed, however,
to induce my mother to dress herself as a woman of the people.
To be sure, when I stayed with my aunts I gladly wore the peasant
costume, which they had worn for years, but then they saw no one--they
had retired from the world but had always remained gentlewomen. They
had not chosen that mode of dress to become one of the lower class.
Their ways, their conversation, their lives, showed the refinement of
their caste. The contrast between their refinement and the peasant
garb pleased them, because it was rustic and made them think of
Trianon; whereas the contrast sought by my father would have made one
think rather of the women who sat and knitted by the guillotine, the
“tricoteuses” of the Revolution.
One day I had a discussion with my father on this subject, and told him
I would much rather see the “white caps” (the name given in Picardy to
the peasant women) wearing hats like mine--although at that time such a
thing was not dreamed of, though doubtless they would have been pleased
to don them--than I should care to wear their caps.
Notwithstanding reservations of this kind, or rather in spite of our
different ways of interpreting the idea of equality, which I wished to
be elevating and not lowering, I agreed entirely with my father as to
the forms of republican principles and as to the social and democratic
programme which I had accepted. I neither laid aside nor disowned my
little book, wherein were inscribed the twenty-one principles of the
future.
My mother and grandmother both reproached my father for forcing my
young mind and causing it to ripen too soon, to which he replied:
“She can think what she pleases later. Either what I have taught her
will satisfy her, as it satisfies me--and I think it will, for she
resembles me more than any other member of the family--or she will
throw off my ideas, as I threw off, in one night, the teachings of the
seminary.”
The end of 1847 fixed in my mind the political convictions which I
have kept, without modification, for more than thirty-five years.
My father’s great abilities, his immense goodness, his love of the
people, his disinterestedness, all of which filled up the void in his
conceptions, made me for many years his disciple.
He believed, and made others believe, that the people possessed, in a
latent degree, all the virtues, and that it would be necessary only to
put them in possession of all their social and political rights for
them to be worthy of both.
In my father’s enthusiasm for “the masses” there was both the
affirmation of a strong ideal and also a great deal of ingenuousness. I
see it now, alas! Our sentimentality was not made of false sentiment,
but of a valiant faith in the necessity of justice and in a proper
proportion of social benefits. For us of the “middle class” to
contribute to the happiness of the people involved a certain sacrifice
which was not lacking in generosity or grandeur.
The belief in universal fraternity, the hope that each nation might
participate in the freedom of other nations, developed the finest of
all qualities--abnegation and heroism in the men who filled prominent
rôles in 1848.
It could not be truthfully said, however, that practical, feasible
ideas possessed the minds of the revolutionists of 1847, since a young
girl, eleven and a half years old, as I was at that time, could be
initiated into all the revolutionary plans, could understand them, be
enthusiastic about them, and strive for their accomplishment. These
plans were undoubtedly somewhat infantile.
Grandmother, to whom I had talked a great deal, was quite taken with
the sentimentality of the idea of regeneration and with the honest
appearance of character of the Liberals and the Republicans, at that
time united. She began to think that the “hirelings of royalty” were
corrupted, and that Louis Philippe was too unyielding to reform and to
progress. Little by little she was being brought around to my father’s
way of thinking. Blondeau, although an office-holder, thought as I did.
Grandfather had received orders from his Bonapartist committee not to
fear socialism, but, on the contrary, to encourage it, and he approved
and supported my most eccentric ideas.
My father, to my great surprise, was not pleased with grandmother’s
half conversion. I had thought he would rejoice in it.
“If the middle class, who yesterday were still royalists, become
republicans, why, then, when we do have a republic they will spoil the
country and turn it royalist. We shall do much better to go slowly
and to form new generations according to our principles than to rally
elements which will create a selfish and middle-class republic instead
of a democratic-socialist--otherwise, generous--republic. I see
already,” my father added, “all the harm that Odilon Barrot is doing.”
He expressed ideas entirely opposite to those of my aunts, who accused
Ledru-Rollin of misleading the campaign of the reformists, while he
accused Odilon Barrot of turning this campaign aside from its end.
My father became every day more fanatical in his ideas. His opinions
became more and more intolerant. Was this the reason of the violence of
his character? Whenever he spoke, either to friends or to myself, of
the future, he always spoke of the rising tide which it would soon be
impossible to stem.
“Our principles clash, all things are as yet in conflict; we ourselves
are powerless to be logical, and our country is bringing forth
monstrous things,” said my father. “Everything is abnormal, because
too many things are being elaborated at the same time. There is such a
thirst for reform that when the first one is made others will follow
which will overstep all we have ever imagined. That is the reason why
King Louis Philippe, very sensibly, for the sake of his own security,
will have none. As to myself,” added my father, “would an electoral
reform satisfy me, would the combination of other intellects satisfy
me, either? What do I desire? To undermine everything, according to
my master, Proudhon, in his ‘Economical Contradictions,’ or to renew
everything, according to my other master, Victor Considérant, as he
teaches in his ‘Principles of Socialism: A Manifesto of Democracy in
the Twentieth Century’? What I do desire with all my heart, and that
which is absolutely necessary, and without which we shall lose our
heads, and exact from the revolution reforms on which no thought has
been bestowed, and which are neither ripened nor likely to live--what I
do desire is to make somewhere, anywhere, an experiment of socialism,
of association, and of life in common, a phalanstery. Then, indeed, the
possibilities of a social change might be proved.”
XXXII
“VIVE LA RÉPUBLIQUE!”
I returned to school, in spite of the pain it gave me. Happily for
me, Maribert had not come back. By degrees I regained my influence.
Stirring political events were following each other in quick
succession, and drew the attention of my young friends whom I had
interested in the importance of what was going on.
Even in the provinces public opinion was irritated by the obstinacy of
King Louis Philippe and of Monsieur Guizot, and by the insufficiency of
a servile House, whose majority was bought. Everyone said--and we also,
the young female politicians of the Mesdemoiselles André’s school,
especially, declared--that “the hour for reforms had sounded!”
It was affirmed that King Louis Philippe pretended to fear nothing and
to laugh at Odilon Barrot and Ledru-Rollin.
Much was said concerning a banquet about to take place in the First
Arrondissement of Paris, and of seditious cries already heard. We
called them “cries of deliverance.” When we shook hands with one
another every morning we murmured, in low tones: “Long live Reform!
Down with Guizot!”
We knew, and kept saying among ourselves, that the people, the great
people, “were stirring in their deep masses.”
And, lo! one day we heard that many of these inoffensive people had
been massacred for making a purely legal demonstration; that King
Louis Philippe, after trying twice to form a ministry, and that the
Duchess of Orléans, after a semblance of regency, were in flight; then
we heard, in quick succession, that the people had erected barricades,
that the National Guard had behaved like heroes, and that the Republic
was proclaimed!
The Republic! and what a grand Republic! My father’s and mine, one that
began by recognizing the people and their right to work!
The Republic had just ratified this privilege, and the people’s
delegates had said, in words worthy of ancient Greece:
“The people have three months of misery to give to the service of the
Republic.”
“The people,” said the _Democratie Pacifique_, “have behaved admirably
and have shown themselves worthy of every liberty. They have proved
their moral maturity. Not a single robbery, nor a single attack on
private property has been committed.” The ragged poor who guarded the
Palace of the Tuileries had put placards along the corridors, reading:
“Death to all thieves!” They had also protected the bank treasure.
France once again was at the head of nations, and gave a new example of
her national grandeur.
My father arrived on the 26th of February. He could not stay quiet at
Blérancourt, and felt that he must share his joy with me.
Grandmother did not appear over-anxious about the revolution.
Grandfather raged. He had thought that the overthrowing of the Orléans
dynasty could be but to the sole advantage of Louis Napoleon. He fell
upon the first triumphant Republican,--his son-in-law,--who came under
his hands, and also upon his stupidly democratic Republic, and none of
us could force him to beat a retreat. My father laughed, grandmother
smiled, and I said:
“Ah! poor grandfather, with our Republic I am afraid your Bonaparte is
in a bad way, however socialistic he may have pretended to be.”
I can remember that at the end of dinner on that 26th of February,
grandfather, who, to console himself for his disappointment, had added
a few bottles of his old Mâcon wine to his usual allowance, said to
us, with eyes rounder than ever: